Tyndmyr wrote:The powers that private detectives and security guards, from what I understand are actually severely limited, in fact they are just ordinary civilians like anyone else. They aren't police and don't have any special authority to effect arrest. The effect they have is mostly from an illusion of authority and bluff. ("Lets rob that bank instead of this one because it has fewer security guards", as an example.) At least, I am pretty sure how that works, but be mistaken on a few of the details.

This is fairly accurate in my experience, where I work we have security, but they aren't really there more to dispense badges, make sure the fire doors are secured and make sure no one looks suss, I suppose on that last one at least. There are funny weaknesses with what they are protecting but I can't talk about that. In any event they are told to call the police and act like a civilian most of the time.

R3sistance - I don't care at all for the ignorance spreading done by many and to the best of my abilities I try to correct this as much as I can, but I know and understand that even I can not be completely honest, truthful and factual all of the time.

Tyndmyr wrote:why does a policeman need greater latitude here than anyone else? If I use violence on someone as a result of my misunderstanding, well...yes, that puts me in a bad place in a trial. And it SHOULD. Same for police.

While I do agree that police is currently afforded way too much leniency in this regard, they probably still need a little more than the average Joe. Precisely because Joe's last resort is (and should be) to call the police, except for acute self-defense. Police, on the other hand, is the last resort.In an ambiguous situation, Joe is expected to defer judgment and call the police, and nobody will hold it against him if he does nothing else. The police is expected to go with the least bad expected outcome, and is responsible for the results of their inaction as well.Security guards and private investigators are a lot closer to average Joe in this regard. Their employers usually don't expect them to actually get into fights, and they won't (in most cases) get fired for not doing so. Above all, it is never part of their job to initiate violence.

Tyndmyr wrote:why does a policeman need greater latitude here than anyone else? If I use violence on someone as a result of my misunderstanding, well...yes, that puts me in a bad place in a trial. And it SHOULD. Same for police.

While I do agree that police is currently afforded way too much leniency in this regard, they probably still need a little more than the average Joe. Precisely because Joe's last resort is (and should be) to call the police, except for acute self-defense. Police, on the other hand, is the last resort.In an ambiguous situation, Joe is expected to defer judgment and call the police, and nobody will hold it against him if he does nothing else. The police is expected to go with the least bad expected outcome, and is responsible for the results of their inaction as well.Security guards and private investigators are a lot closer to average Joe in this regard. Their employers usually don't expect them to actually get into fights, and they won't (in most cases) get fired for not doing so. Above all, it is never part of their job to initiate violence.

Police being responsible for the results of inaction...not at all guaranteed, I'm afraid. There have been court cases that have found the police have no duty to help you. So...that seems...broken.

Citizen's arrest rules still exist, and though they are not commonly used now, used to be essentially standard.

Tyndmyr wrote:There have been court cases that have found the police have no duty to help you. So...that seems...broken.

I don't know that it's broken. They can't help everyone even if it were mandated. They can't be everywhere at once. And making them liable makes the entity behind them liable. Government can't and shouldn't be responsible in detail for your safety. The greater value is to make the environment for everyone safer. Which is their purpose.

To widen it out, that specific supreme court case is US only. In most countries whilst not mandated to aid / intervene, there is an expectation with officer sanctions that drives intervention. Still, that said there are examples in the UK were police have let children drown because of "elf and safety". In my benign dictatorship such officers would find themselves with a long swim themselves.....

In the life guard, they always stressed that you should not risk your life to save drowning people. A surprisingly high number of people die in rescue attempts, given how rare such situations are.

There is a good underlying logic: rescuing a drowning person is almost always harder than you estimate. Distances are longer, currents stronger, water colder than it seems from the side. And drowning people are a serious burden. They can panic and pull under even a strong swimmer in calm water. Also, drowning can go fast. Once someone is struggling to stay breathing, they are likely gone before you reach them.

So if you are not completely sure that you will make it to victim and back, then you are likely to fail. The victim will drown anyway, and very possibly you as well. Or the original victim is swept to a lucky safe spot, but the rescuers dies. This happens.

Seriously, the best bets are throwing a line, a floating object, or you are in a boat already. To have a shot at swimming to the rescue, the victim has to be distressed but not yet actually drowning, and the water has to be pretty calm.

Tyndmyr wrote:There have been court cases that have found the police have no duty to help you. So...that seems...broken.

I don't know that it's broken. They can't help everyone even if it were mandated. They can't be everywhere at once. And making them liable makes the entity behind them liable. Government can't and shouldn't be responsible in detail for your safety. The greater value is to make the environment for everyone safer. Which is their purpose.

But if we're going with that, the "they're responsible for inaction" argument breaks down a bit as a justification to give them increased powers.

Now, we're not talking about police even having a level of responsibility on par with lifeguards. Folks mostly understand that lifeguards do what they can, but can't fix everything. Likewise, police. Nobody demands perfect outcomes all the time. But, is the police department liable even if they clearly are able, but just don't care? The answer is, in the US, mostly no.

You didn't give them anything, the government you elected did. Who, oddly enough, will get sued if you make them try to protect everyone directly. Because they can't. Every life they save directly is a bonus. If they can get there when you call, hooray for you.

Tyndmyr wrote:But, is the police department liable even if they clearly are able, but just don't care? The answer is, in the US, mostly no.

Probably true in practice. Which is a large part of why I agree with you on drastically cutting down their rights to match their actual responsibility.We only seem to differ in how much additional responsibility (and the rights necessary to fulfill them) police officers should have compared to everyone else (which, for me, is "some, but less than now" and for you seems to be "none").

Tyndmyr wrote:But, is the police department liable even if they clearly are able, but just don't care? The answer is, in the US, mostly no.

Probably true in practice. Which is a large part of why I agree with you on drastically cutting down their rights to match their actual responsibility.We only seem to differ in how much additional responsibility (and the rights necessary to fulfill them) police officers should have compared to everyone else (which, for me, is "some, but less than now" and for you seems to be "none").

Well, I see it as a minimization exercise in getting as close to none as possible. It may not be possible to hit exactly none, but that's the ideal goal if you can arrange it.

Before you have a love in you need to agree on the laws police need to enforce too. You can't apply near stateless principles in a highly statist legal framework

On the saving people thing, yes its an on the spot risk assessment thing, but i do expect my emergency services (the paid ones at least) to actually take risks, particularly if the only risk is to themselves. I'm not talking about being mandated to jump into maelstroms, but in the UK health & safety is used as a cover for a lot of cowardice (imo naturally)

leady wrote:Before you have a love in you need to agree on the laws police need to enforce too. You can't apply near stateless principles in a highly statist legal framework

On the saving people thing, yes its an on the spot risk assessment thing, but i do expect my emergency services (the paid ones at least) to actually take risks, particularly if the only risk is to themselves. I'm not talking about being mandated to jump into maelstroms, but in the UK health & safety is used as a cover for a lot of cowardice (imo naturally)

Well, naturally, I'm for minimization of laws as well. If a law doesn't have a solid justification of net benefit, at a minimum, it should not exist. And hell, some of those are still subjective. Some stuff has stuck around for quite a good bit of time based mostly on inertia, not really on data suggesting it actually does anything. Killing a bunch of those laws is a start. Minimizing trivial laws where the enforcement causes more conflict than the law prevents is also a good policy. In general, most folks are going to agree on basic anti-violence laws and so forth as necessary, but the more you have one group trying to impose their goals on others that are generally not widely accepted, the more conflict you'll have. In short, police/law should exist to protect folks. Not as a cudgel to change society into what you want.

And yes, that happens in the US, too. Police shootings are almost always accompanied by the danger the policeman felt he was in, etc. Even if it's not a very plausible tale. I suppose it's a fairly obvious excuse, but I agree, it shouldn't be given the credence it seems to get.

I have not read many of the post here, but I had an idea. A common idea is to put video cameras on cops' uniforms, but I do not think that will work though. It is easy to 'accidentally' cover the lens with your jacket, or make the camera was face the wrong way. I think a better idea would be to use 2 microphones. It is much very difficult to 'accidentally' prevent sound from entering a microphone, and the fact that there is two helps. That is not the main reason I think that there should be two though.

Microphones pick up sound regardless of direction the sound is coming from; which can be a problem when you are trying to locate the source of a sound. However, two microphones could work together to find the direction that sound came from. If the sound was loader for the right microphone than the left, then we know the sound came from the right. It is a little like how two eyes are needed for depth perception.

If a team was told to analyze video retrieved from a cop's camera, I think the audio data would actually be more informative than the visual data. No matter how you attach it, a camera is going to move a lot when an officer runs. A microphone would record a lot of noise from the officer's cloths, but that can be filtered out. If something is not in a frame, there is nothing you can do to learn about it.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. There is one other point I have to say about this plan however. It is not going to work. No matter what happens, no matter what incentives you make, a bad cop is going to do bad things. The only solution is to make sure that people who would become corrupt or brutal or become corrupted or brutal are never hired. When I find a way to measure a person's character and morals, I will let the people here know. Until then, the best we can do is give recruits a very intense psychological exam and good theory to officers who need it.

"You are not running off with Cow-Skull Man Dracula Skeletor!" -Socrates

jewish_scientist wrote:I have not read many of the post here, but I had an idea. A common idea is to put video cameras on cops' uniforms, but I do not think that will work though.

It's been tried in a few areas, and I believe current data shows it does work, fairly dramatically.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. There is one other point I have to say about this plan however. It is not going to work. No matter what happens, no matter what incentives you make, a bad cop is going to do bad things. The only solution is to make sure that people who would become corrupt or brutal or become corrupted or brutal are never hired. When I find a way to measure a person's character and morals, I will let the people here know. Until then, the best we can do is give recruits a very intense psychological exam and good theory to officers who need it.

Incentives are incentives. Yes, bad people will exist regardless. But, bad people are not entirely unable to change or immune to fear. They wish to avoid being caught and the penalties thereof. Of course, for that to be valid, both being caught and being penalized once caught must be actual threats.

There is no such thing as perfect "bad person" test. We will ALWAYS need ongoing assessment and action to penalize people who act badly once in authority.

People do behave better when they believe they are being watched. I know it's not quite the same effect scientifically (posters of eyes vs cameras) but there is this study:

A group of scientists at Newcastle University, headed by Melissa Bateson and Daniel Nettle of the Center for Behavior and Evolution, conducted a field experiment demonstrating that merely hanging up posters of staring human eyes is enough to significantly change people’s behavior.

Over the course of 32 days, the scientists spent many hours recording customer’s “littering behavior” in their university’s main cafeteria, counting the number of people that cleaned up after themselves after they had finished their meals.

In their study, the researchers determined the effect of the eyes on individual behavior by controlling for several conditions (e.g. posters with a corresponding verbal text, without any text, male versus female faces, posters of something unrelated like flowers, etc).

The posters were hung at eye-level and every day the location of each poster was randomly determined.

The researchers found that during periods when the posters of eyes, instead of flowers, overlooked the diners, twice as many people cleaned up after themselves

Human beings are deeply social animals, and small things can make a big difference to behaviour. In particular, raising the perceived chance of getting caught has a much bigger effect than raising the perceived punishment.

You might be able to explain away your camera getting covered up once, but not repeatedly. And all officers' cameras simultaneously and repeatedly becoming covered would be even more suspicious.

I did not mean to say that incentives are useless. They will reduce the amount of bad behaviors and increase the amount of good behaviors. My point is that no incentive will reduce the rate of bad behavior to 0%. If a person is going good only because they fear punishment, then they will do bad behaviors as soon as they believe they can get away with it. For example, a officer my not care that they are being video taped because they know that they will not be punished (citation: Rodney King case). I would definitely vote for a bill that required cops in my area to wear microphones and/or cameras; but I would remember that police brutality will still happen.

"You are not running off with Cow-Skull Man Dracula Skeletor!" -Socrates

jewish_scientist wrote:I did not mean to say that incentives are useless. They will reduce the amount of bad behaviors and increase the amount of good behaviors. My point is that no incentive will reduce the rate of bad behavior to 0%.

So? Is there a system that does?

If a person is going good only because they fear punishment, then they will do bad behaviors as soon as they believe they can get away with it. For example, a officer my not care that they are being video taped because they know that they will not be punished (citation: Rodney King case). I would definitely vote for a bill that required cops in my area to wear microphones and/or cameras; but I would remember that police brutality will still happen.

I believe all participants so far have been willing to entertain ideas of additional measures, including promoting police punishment when caught.

But in practice, no degree of punishment is very effective unless you're first good at catching violators. We could institute an immediate death penalty for officer over-reactions or something equally draconian, but I wouldn't expect it to be very good or helpful(perhaps even negatively so) on it's own.

Police brutality is a tough issue. Body cams help, but on the individual level, there are many laws that allow police to legally use disproportionate force. For example, an officer in MO who has probable cause to believe that an individual has committed or attempted to commit a felony, or may inflict serious physical injury on others, is justified in using deadly force.

In addition, while lower federal courts do consider the availability of alternative methods of subduing a suspect in specific cases, this does not extend to whether a department should integrate alternative methods.

If police departments avoid designing/implementing alternative methods for subduing a suspect and the state has laws that allow legal use of disproportionate force, this usually results in immunity from police brutality claims in all but the most egregious situations.

Legal requirements for police departments to implement alternative methods of subduing suspects and changing laws about us to force to match up with the general rule for self defense (or defense of others) in the US would allow many of the current cases to be successfully prosecuted and would hopefully result in a substantial reduction in excessive use of force by LEOs.

Seriously, read all of those. It's fucking lunacy in this country. And this is by no means comprehensive – I just add stories as I happen to see them, and I've left out a few where the facts seemed a little uncertain.

roflwaffle wrote:Police brutality is a tough issue. Body cams help, but on the individual level, there are many laws that allow police to legally use disproportionate force. For example, an officer in MO who has probable cause to believe that an individual has committed or attempted to commit a felony, or may inflict serious physical injury on others, is justified in using deadly force.

However, many of the cases we've talked about fall well short of that bar by any reasonable standard. I'm also concerned that, apparently "probable cause that a felony has been committed" is seen as universal justification for deadly force.

Plenty of felonies are not particularly violent. I'm reasonably okay with using force to bring in a murderer, even lethal force if need be, but I'm rather less okay with it for non-violent crimes.

I've only skim read a section of this thread, so forgive me if this has already been raised as a point elsewhere

It seems a large part of the problem in the USA is the culture around the police force. While oversight measures (such as body cams that have already been discussed here) are absolutely helpful, these do little to change the culture of brutality among police. Cops are, ultimately, human beings; they wouldn't be committing morally bankrupt acts like they are if they didn't feel the community they lived in would absolve them of any guilt.

From what I gather, based on some of the language used by cops in these (frankly disturbing) videos and personal accounts of brutality, the police feel like they are a persecuted group. They feel that their role requires them to risk their life every day, and that the public, rather than thanking them, actively hates them.

It seems to me that an essential element of reducing police brutality would be introducing the police force to the idea that yes, they are a persecuted group. Depending on their role, they will likely be harmed, or possibly die, in the line of duty. They will do all this because the society they protect, including the criminals in that society, is worth the cost. Replace this idea that people become cops to be Action Heroes (which seems to be quite prevalent, at least from the minimal amounts I've seen over there) with the far more accurate idea that cops are, to an extent, going to suffer on behalf of (and at the hands of) the society they protect.

It would be necessary to change the publics perception of the police force, but I'll leave those ideas for another time[edit] as background, I live in Australia and have some politically-minded friends in the 'states.

Police are hated precisely because they are perceived as perpetuating unwarranted violence against the public, especially in cases where the person assaulted was not acting violently. The more that the person-on-the-street believes that a cop would assault them, the more they will believe that cops are their enemy.

cops aren't hated generally, they are "hated" by the smallish groups that both have some grievance and are heavily heavily propagandised to make those grievances seem more important than things that really effect their lives. But this of course is a side issue to police brutality.

I don't hate cops. But I don't trust them, either. They don't necessarily have my best interests in mind, and they sometimes go badly off the rails. So, a bit of distrust seems healthy. Avoidance, where possible.

"Hatred" may indeed be an overly strong term, but I was responding to the earlier posts that described police as believing that the public hates them.

Anyway, it's a vicious cycle--police perpetrate excessive violence upon non-violent suspects, and that increases the public perception that Police are prone to violence. Once this reaches a critical mass, the general public perception of police will reflect a fear that anyone suspected of any offense (e.g. acting non-lucid in public and thus being suspected of possessing illegal drugs whether true or not) will be subject to violence at the officers' whims.